As much as I am hip-hop, I'm soul. As much as I am soul, I'm a turntablist. As much as I'm a DJ, I love jazz and rock.
Jazz has always been a melting pot of influences and I plan to incorporate them all.
As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.
There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.
If it comes out sounding like Dixieland jazz or classical or punk or rock or even slightly metal, that's because that's where I'm going to find inspiration.
Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.
the grace is being able to like rock music, symphony music, jazz … anything that contains the original energy of joy.
I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on.
I was a beginner again. I practiced hard and used to listen very closely to recordings of American jazz drummers such as Tony Williams and Kenny Clarke.
The jazz clubs wind up having only rich tourists - the kids can't come. If they do, then they spend their entire monthly allotments on a 45-minute set.
It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.
The first jazz pianist I heard was Thelonious Monk. My father was listening to an album of his called 'Monk's Dream' almost every day from the time I was born.
Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.
The Meters are, I think, the most influential group in our time to come out of New Orleans, to have changed and introduced us all to a way of playing, and to a groove and a level of feel in playing funk-jazz.
Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.
I've gone the full spectrum - from gospel to blues to jazz to soul to pop - and the public has accepted what I've done through it all. I think it means I've been doing something right at the right time.
You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.
Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.
I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn't have to write for my living.
The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is ...
Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.
